IT'S the Nanny State, they say - they being those who like an all-encompassing grumble.

Complaints about state interference in our lives have grown under New Labour. Why this should be so is confusing, largely because New Labour itself is confusing.

Tony Blair created the party in his image, yet what does he represent? Is he a free-market evangelist with a fake social conscience - or an undercover socialist who does sly good while pretending to be new model Thatcherite?

Does he believe in: a) anything; b) everything; c) nothing; d) whatever it takes? Or is he the political equivalent of those children's games where you build someone out of assorted mismatched pieces of other people?

I have been trying to puzzle this out and cannot arrive at an answer. I could pour myself a drink to ease the unlocking of this conundrum, but it is only ten in the morning. And Tuesday, which is not for me a drinking day.

Neither, in general, is Monday, Wednesday or Thursday, which happily leaves Friday, Saturday and Sunday free for mostly mild indulgence.

Drinking moderately some days and not at all on others suits me. It wouldn't do for those who prefer more or for the abstemious, but it sees me through the week.

Sometimes the pattern is broken, human nature being what it is. So I'm not about to preach to anyone about how much they should or should not drink.

It may seem that this week's column has taken an odd turn, switching from a contemplation of what exactly Tony Blair stands for to a short account of my alcohol intake. But there is logic at work here, or at least what passes for logic to my way of thinking.

If New Labour is often accused of running a Nanny State, then dear Nanny is prone to carrying on in strange ways.

While Nanny snatches the cigarettes from our hands and delivers stern warnings on the perils of binge drinking, she is also busy arranging for pubs to be open for 24 hours a day, should they wish.

Alcohol consumption is reported to have risen by 12 per cent under Tony Blair - and not all of that can be put down to people seeing the Prime Minister on the television and immediately reaching for the bottle opener and corkscrew.

Drink is now, in real terms, cheaper than ever. The streets of our town and cities are awash with drunks who readily turn violent - that's if they are not busy vomiting all over the place or relieving themselves in shop doorways.

York, sadly, is all too familiar with this less than pretty picture.

At least 40 per cent of violent crime is linked to alcohol. So why is the Government wilfully pushing ahead with 24-hour opening?

According to one report at the weekend, an estimated six million people in England and Wales drink twice the weekly recommended limit (a statistic which, tellingly, entirely misses out the big-drinking Scots). So we need little encouragement to drink more.

Yet the Government, which stubbornly sticks to certain causes while letting others drift, seems insistent on getting its way with 24-hour opening.

It indulges the drinks industry outrageously, letting the booze corporations get away with disguising strong drink as pop and turning a blind eye to fatally attractive promotions which encourage young people to drink as much as possible for the cheapest possible price.

While all this has been going on, the Government has been warning us about the dangers of binge drinking - a campaign picked up with evangelical zeal by the sort of national newspapers that once provided a haven for the terminally sozzled.

As for the Prime Minister, he seems to be weaving, as it were, between the pub and the health centre, with an invitation to Britain's biggest booze party in one hand and, in the other, a stern lecture on why we should not drink so much.

It's all so confusing and a nice malt whisky would help.

But that will have to wait until Friday.

Updated: 08:54 Thursday, January 20, 2005